Savagezion said:
ONe could claim that having no manuals means a significant portion of time was tied up into making in game tutorials and gameplay centered around it. The first 20 minutes of any game is usually a drawn out sequence of events to teach you how to do stuff, when those same events could be more about the game world itself. Additionally, it makes starting a new game annoying to have to push past those crappy tutorial parts.
True, but that's something that needs to have greater attention drawn to it in reviews. Tutorials should be a separate option in the main menu or skippable in the main game. Forced tutorials suck for people replaying and game and if it's a franchise, it sucks for everyone who already learned to play in part 1 and now has to sit through the lessons again in part 2.
Also, developers need to remember to keep the tutorials all in one place. I was originally going to site games like Gears (tutorial can be skipped) or Red Alert 3 (tutorial is in the main menu as another option) as examples of it being done right, but then I remembered that no, it's not right. Even if you chose skip in Gears or just start the game in RA3, there's still a ton of scripted crap to teach you how to play. No matter how many times you've played Gears 1 and regardless of if you skip or play the tutorial, there's still a scripted event where Dom goes down but not out so the game can teach you how to revive squadmates. I've beaten Gears 3's campaign on Insane both in regular campaign and arcade, but if I decide I want to play the story over again it still won't let me leave Marcus' room at the start of the damn game until it reminds me how to use the tat-com by forcing me to press LB before I can continue. Never mind that I've beaten Red Alert 3 many times over, the first missions of all factions are filled with scripted bullshit to teach you the controls that I already know from having played the tutorials when I first bought the game and countless hours spent playing it since.
Games, I already know how to play you, so get the fuck out of my way and let me do just that!
What, are they afraid that people will skip the tutorials or something? It's easy, just make the tutorials the only thing you can pick at the main menu until after you finish them. That way you know everyone who starts a new game has done the tutorial and you can just let people play instead of having a second tutorial. Games like Gears 3 can scan your profile for achievements from the first two Gears games to unlock weapon and character skins. It should also be looking at my achievements for campaign completion and if it sees that I've beaten the first two games on the hardest difficulty, it should be able to say to itself "Okay, this guy probably knows what he's doing by now, we can let him leave the room at the start of the game without forcing him to press LB."
And at the very least, the bare minimum, every game should be able to scan
itself and see that if you've already completed the game, it doesn't need to force another round of tutorials on you if you want to replay it. Just about every game ever these days creates a file for our in-game options of things like brightness, controls, audio settings, and stuff like that. Throw something in that file to note when the game has been completed as well so the tutorials can be turned off. I'm sick of nearly every game treating me like every replay is my first time touching a controller or keyboard and mouse. Oh, and of course, put something in the options menu after that happens to allow tutorials to be re-enabled if the player wishes (because you know somebody will complain about my idea otherwise just for the sake of disagreeing).
